follow the clues

whenever I see these spray-painted street markings, it reminds me that someday I want to write a story in which very important and very secret messages are hidden in plain sight alongside these boring-but-mysterious codes for construction workers.

don't they look like they could secretly be pointing the way to some amazing treasure or a secure rebel hideout or rendezvous point?

the trick of successfully hiding your heroes' secret messages among such mundane non-secret signs would hang on how well the secret codes can balance blending in with the real marks and standing out from them at the same time. you wouldn't want to mislead the construction crews with marks that looked legitimate but didn't provide any meaningful information. you also wouldn't want too many random suburbanites getting in search of a garage sale that didn't exist (although depending on the stakes for our rebel alliance's secret missions, this actually might be an acceptable cost).

I've also daydreamed about the heroes of this story sending coded messages via weekend garage-sale signage or random highway-side propaganda posters. or maybe in the windows of an old car in someone's side yard-- "For Sale, 255K miles, $600, 555-251-9839" could be the master key to deciphering the next series of secret codes. if the car is facing west, decode everything backwards instead. and if any innocent party calls the phone number, nobody will answer.

it's fun to think about this kind of covert-messaging-in-plain-sight. in a sense, all the spray-painted lines and shorthand markings on the street are already a secret code. not a very important secret, but more or less black-boxed from most regular everyday people. these marks have a relatively narrow audience, and the rest of us either ignore them or create elaborate daydreams in which an even narrower audience can read beyond their surface meanings and thereby figure out where to safely deliver some top secret packet of highly incriminating evidence.

to make sure our secret agents can reliably distinguish and decipher the messages intended for them, would they have to become fluent in all the regular street marking conventions of their region? in that case, this piece from the BBC could be useful.

there is also a 99% Invisible article all about utility markings and their history in various countries. pretty interesting stuff.

seeing enigmatic secrets like this in mundane, utilitarian stuff is a little Dan Brown-esque I suppose. I promise, if and when I write such an adventure story, I'll try my best not to make it so blatantly sensational and pulpy.

re-reading and un-liking stuff on twitter and elsewhere

yesterday I did some re-reading. first, I re-read six months or so of things I've liked on twitter. a confession: sometimes as I skim through things I once liked on twitter, I end up un-liking things I once liked in the past. liking never has to be permanent, does it? nothing is permanent. some twitter things are not things I feel like my likes need to stay on-record for. is that okay?

second, I re-read three months or so of my file of semi-daily meta-scholarly writing. it was good to remember some of the fun, inspired conference notes and see little inches of progress on projects. that file is 370 pages long now. messy, and not truly daily, but still an accomplishment.

I'm sure most of the stuff in that file is sixteen thousand times more boring to the world than most of the stuff I've liked and not yet un-liked on twitter. if we could quantify boringness, anyway.

the twitterings that I like on twitter seem to fall into pretty clear categories:

1. there are links to things that exist and that just seem wonderful--

A Searchable Database for Every Bob Ross Canvas from Joy of Painting https://t.co/lryPrbN95J I WILL MISS YOU PRODUCTIVITY.

— Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) March 30, 2017

A librarian has matched @librivox audiobooks to his community’s walking trails! So clever! https://t.co/dqzCDh17O7

— Kara Shallenberg (@kayray) May 14, 2017

2. there are lovely impressive and/or brave pieces of micro-blogged inspiration--

Happiness is the capacity to be surprised. pic.twitter.com/cN2Jt5kxoj

— Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) March 9, 2017

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. -Susan Sontag #AmWriting pic.twitter.com/dTXp6WEInS

— Writer's Edit (@WritersEdit) April 20, 2017

white people using their privilege to educate, a concept! pic.twitter.com/6ugbTtxSOH

— con(no)r (@ctfuconnor) May 12, 2017

Here's the cheat sheet for the 4 conundrums of the universe that our brains attempt to solve with what we call biases: pic.twitter.com/cMwHJhElVL

— Buster (@buster) January 8, 2017

or do some of these count as lessons? instructions, perhaps?


3. there are cool, amusing blips of nothing all that important--

My next d&d character may or may not work in service of a deity modeled after Donna Haraway.

— Mike, but furious (@mikerugnetta) June 6, 2017

Word of the day: "undersong" - the underlying sounds of a landscape; the ambient murmur of an environment, often hard to hear or tune in to. pic.twitter.com/BHxQUS5X4y

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) June 6, 2017

4. there are attitudes and ideas that I find myself agreeing with, resonating with--

One more thing: No matter what we write, we write as a witnesses to our time. We do it involuntarily, like sap trapping bugs in amber.

— Alyssa Harad (@alyssaharad) February 7, 2017

My new teaching goal in life is to make sure everyone knows how to delete the blank extra page of that document they send out to everyone.

— Casey Boyle (@caseyboyle) January 8, 2017

that is a valid life goal, right there. don't leave blank pages at the end of your documents, people. it's all part of that "paying attention to the world" thing.


and 5. there are links to longform stuff that I imagine I'll go back to read later--

“...people are changing public space for their own purposes ... because they want to create something.” https://t.co/gooRfsyzU9

— Chris Jordan (@mantweed) February 20, 2017

.@edwardsdusty Dustin Edwards has brought home the 2016 Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award! Wanna read his diss? https://t.co/Zz8NDmiW2c

— UCF Writing&Rhetoric (@UCF_DWR) June 6, 2017

sometimes I do go back and read them. sometimes I change my mind when later arrives. sometimes I forget entirely. I can't read everything. and twitter is not really meant to be a bookmarking service. but I'll use twitter however I want, okay?

record, erase, re-record

my babysteps into the world of LibriVox volunteering are going alright, so far. only one of the projects I've been working on has been completed this year-- a collection of Sappho's poems, translated by a fellow with the awesome name of Bliss Carman. I was the designated proof-listener for that recording. I'm also signed up to proof-listen these three other projects:

Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon (about half finished)
The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, Vol. 8, translated by Richard Francis Burton (just getting started)
A Chinese Wonder Book by Norman Hinsdale Pitman (yet to see any progress)

listening to poems is great. they are almost all somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes long, and very quick to check.

I've recorded some poems, too. the first recordings I made were from a collection called Gleams of Sunshine by the Canadian minister Joseph Horatio Chant. I signed up to do three of his pieces: "Niagara's Rainbow," "My Sister Nell and I" (which was kind of depressing), and "Gather the Wayside Flowers." my sections are all done and proofed, but the whole collection is still in progress.

I'm now working on recording a whole spat of poems by Francis Thompson. apparently he might have been an infamous murderer? yikes. so far the poetry I've read isn't so scandalous--just chock full of classical allusions and fanciful introspections about love and beauty. yesterday, I noticed this line in the third of my assigned series--an ode to a goddess:

"O therefore you who are / What words, being to such mysteries / As raiment to the body is, / Should rather hide than tell"

interesting to think of words as the curtains and clothing of mystery. language obscuring but also accentuating the body of thought. I am remembering conversations I've had with friend Eric, the linguist, about what language happens to do for us, and how we force it into the service of our ideas. he would probably have more detailed things to say about the potential for words to cover up just as much as they might uncover.

all these thoughts want to be linked up with my memory of this arresting and bewildering art installation, Zeno Writing. dear Patti and I saw it in Houston last month. searching for it just now, I found a nice review of the piece from several years ago.

the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston posts some words about the Kentridge installation. Amber Ladd's review adds a bunch more words. my few words here might count, if I could think of what else to say about the film. words seem inadequate. but I can think of more descriptors if I try: stark. engrossing. looped. unwinding. none of these will convey enough of the room and the sound and the feeling of the art. if you go watch this other piece by the same artist, you might get a small sense of it. something more direct than words.

Zeno Writing is remixed from a book, it seems. The Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo, published in 1923, originally in Italian. the book is probably in the public domain, given that date. but its translation may not be. for whatever reason or lack thereof, there is no LibriVox recording of it yet. maybe someday, though.

my other, non-poetical LibriVox recording work includes two whimsical, rambly chapters from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions, by Wirt Sikes, and the preface and introduction to The Art of Bookbinding by Joseph William Zaehnsdorf. these are longer book projects, so it will be a while before they're finished and released in the LibriVox catalogue.

within the next week or so I need to get to chapter 25 of Anne of Green Gables and chapters 20 and 27 of Little Women. how could I not sign up to work on those recordings?

hey, you could join in and record some too. everyone is welcome.

word of mouth

my phone rang (and by rang, understand that I do mean buzzed silently in my pocket) in the middle of the first panel of the conference I attended last weekend. and even though this was an expected phone call, I could not answer it just then. I was listening to talks on digital pop music criticism and massively open online educational surveillance.

the message would probably be from the owner of the car I had parallel-parked next to the night before, on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. it was nearing eleven o'clock at night. it was dark. my rearview mirror was dimmed. it was a tiny little smart car. I couldn't see it at all and I backed right into the thing.

I didn't see much damage, but since my own night vision was not to be trusted at that point, I took a couple photos of the car's front bumper and left a note of confession.

the message was indeed in response to that note. my head was full of dreadful scenarios as I listened... a chirpy salesfellow named Jason from Car2Go greeted me via voicemail with so much positive spin in his voice I immediately stopped worrying that I'd been just as blind to some dreadful gash on the car as I had been to the car itself. instead of any kind of angry blame, Jason explained that the Car2Go fleet was used to encountering occasional rough treatment on the streets of the city. no worries. and then he took a few extra minutes to tell me about the business, sandwiching his pitch inbetween thanks for my honesty.

since I'm not a regular Minneapolis resident I can't take advantage of this particular car-sharing service. but it was so nice and surprising to get such a happy little message that I thought I could at least blog about it. if this particular car-sharing program happens to operate in your corner of the universe, I can tell you they seem like pretty nice folks.

I considered joining a car-sharing dealio before the semester began, during my week of carlessness. they do seem cool. I've met several folks around here who use ZipCar, and much of the philosophy behind the whole car-sharing setup is awesome. making do with less is important.

but on the other hand... part-time access to a fleet of shared, borrowable vehicles like these wouldn't have been very convenient for flying around to Minnesota and Iowa last weekend. so.

inhale envy

Saturday I was out running errands (legitimize the new car, donate all those excess clothes, pick the last two zucchini from the garden plot) and had a few moments to kill in between places of business that open at 8:30am on weekends and stores that didn't open until 10:00. Barnes and Noble presented itself, conveniently in between these times, and I wandered in to browse.

my favourite shelves in bookstores are the ones with the blank books. there's only so long you can gush over those, though, so I also explored the games aisles and the news aisles and the clearance bins. there were tempting boxes of chocolate in the clearance bins... but I was only there to kill time, not spend any money. I'm still subsisting on the tail end of tiny slash nonexistent summer paychecks, so I'm putting off as much spending as possible until next month.

my other favourite shelves are the ones with new books. Barnes and Noble has one of these too, perpendicular to the coffee-dispensing section of the store.

I picked up and perused the first pages of a little paperback with a yellow-pea-coated girl on the cover. white block letters, out-of-focus trees in the background. it was the title that caught my eye. The Opposite of Loneliness. Marina Keegan. Introduction by Anne Fadiman.

I must admit I didn't remember any of that information over the weekend. I didn't remember what it was called or what it looked like or how it was bound. all I remembered was the twist that jumped out from the middle of that glowing Introduction by Anne Fadiman, and the reason I put the book down.

but in order to write about that, I needed to remember all the other details. an isolated, poignant twist with no detailed context wouldn't quite be a story worth telling, would it?

as anyone else would have in this forgetful situation, I turned to the world's favourite (or least favourite?) external memory aid slash search algorithm.

these are the words I ventured to feed into the search box:

writing student dies dead student publishes collection

and there I've given away the whole sad, slow, sinking, twist, so there may not be much hope of painting for you the sense of holding a lovely book of essays in your hands, of reading along about the quirks and dreams and pleadings of its author, starting to wonder, to envy, and feeling even a bit anxious to skim through this Introduction and taste the insides of this collection--to traipse right into the essays this student of Anne Fadiman's must have had such writerly fun drafting and polishing...

...and then realizing, without knowing why it took you so long, that Anne Fadiman's past tense was is not the regular, innocent past tense was.

I snapped the book shut and half-tossed it back on its shelf, not even bothering to straighten it up with its fellow copies.

her last Yale Daily News column comes up first in the search results.

a Huffington Post eulogy-esque review (or is it more a review-esque eulogy? I'm not sure) is second.

I'm not sure what made me so suddenly give up on that shiny new book. maybe, after hearing so much praise and promise, it seemed unfair. maybe the praise and promise seemed pasted-on and obligatory to me, too thick, once I knew their recipient wasn't around anymore. I felt cheated, disbelieving. maybe I couldn't swallow the implications of envying a talented but tragically dead Yale graduate.

foreshadowy snippets

next thursday I'll be more than halfway to Minneapolis. there is a conference. once there, I will present something (the something I didn't quite get around to blogging about in this post). I will hopefully meet some other fascinating scholars who share my geeky interest in copyright/authorship/ownership/remix/etc. I even have plans to sneak into blog-friend Gina's studio and say hello, if I can (did you know she's writing a book? it looks very lovely).

as seems usual at these times when I have so much going on and so many preparations to make in the run up to a small journey, my list (pile? collection? backlog?) of things I haven't yet blogged about but very much ought to is expanding beyond control.

I could make an exceedingly random photo essay using some of the photos currently saved in my blog-drafts file. that might be interesting.... but I think the photos deserve their own less-random accompanying text. forcing them into one crazy blogpost together is not what I want to do with them.

what I do want to do with them is...something else. maybe I don't know what that something else is yet, since presumably if I did, I would not have so many unfinished blog-drafts piling up. there are too many ideas for blogging. and I don't always remember all the ideas well enough or long enough to get back to them and make them fully intelligible to other humans. if I were better at remembering, and/or deciding, and/or writing in my sleep, this pile of drafts might be smaller and my blog might also be, on the whole, more interesting.

one of these old saved drafts (from mid-2011, says the blogger timestamp) has had (for who knows how long) nothing in it but the following quoted material on the subject of false memories. mid-2011, I should note, was a little while before Jonah Lehrer went and ruined his career by making up things and being lazy. he has, since that whole scandal two years ago, lost much of my respect and largely disappeared from the public eye. blogger and I kept this quote around anyway. today I've come back to it and now it is no longer languishing as a lonely little draft.

revisiting the quote and its link of reference, I was a little surprised to see that Wired has so far sustained not only this, but all the rest of Lehrer's old columns as well.

"A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it," he writes. but that's not the beginning. the piece starts with a rambly story about drinking Coke at a football game. it isn't his story to tell, though. it's not his memory--it's totally fake. apparently "we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere," and "This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information."

processes. mm. I like thinking about things as processes. the never-ending kind are the most attractive, for some reason.

Lehrer goes on about memory and marketing. who knows why I saved this whole excerpt for my blog way back in mid-2011. today it still speaks to plenty of my own half-formed ideas on narrative power and cognitive malleability.

It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

stealing and inventing... honesty and accuracy... "borrowing" and "forgetting" original source material. hmmm. falsified memories, fabricated quotations? oh the foreshadowy connections we might want to draw between the words this talented science writer is using, the themes he is dancing with, and his eventual semi-tragic, very disappointing downfall.

in my drafts file, two additional words accompany the pasted set of quotes from Jonah Lehrer's old Wired article. those words are "graven images."

I have no clue what I was thinking when I added them to that tiny seed of a blogpost idea.

I have a few clues about some of my other standing drafts. some of them wouldn't be so hard to flesh out into something useful, if I'd just sit down and write.

there are photos of:

• piecrust (filled with cheese, noodles, spinach)
• a stack of textbooks from last fall (English 680: digital studio)
• important Texas landmarks (the Alamo and the capitol building)
• a stand of trees in the middle of Idaho
• art and architecture from Chicago
• a box of yarn (mostly shades of pink)

there are also scrambled snippety notes about desire and calculus, about teaching and failure, disciplinarity, technological shifts, and the Management of Digital Rights. I want to blog about secret codes and the meaning of The Period Store and informally conducted surveys. there is a draft containing only the words "decidedly analog," and someday I'll figure out what to write about that will fit that title.

fall semester, 2014

last week at this hour large parts of me were dreading the pressure and obligation of classes and campus. maybe I've been too busy to think about all that this week. or maybe the dread was unfounded and silly.

maybe both.

I have surrendered my life for the next four months to many, many things. it's exciting for now, and I'm hoping I don't get strangled by difficulties later on. there will be so much reading. so much theory. so much mental chewing-on-things and so much hurrying about from classroom to classroom, wearing different hats, looking through different windows.

I'll manage. I must.

English 680 Gender, Rhetoric, and the Body with Dr. Jenny Bay 
we'll be working with a few local social service programs in this class: Food Finders and WIC. our first readings have covered the connections between athletics and rhetoric, some thoughts on violence as related to gender and race, and a lot of fascinating theory about pain, torture, war, and language. I think this is the class I'm most excited about.

English 680 Professional Writing Theory with Dr. Patricia A. Sullivan
and here we will read and read and see if we can figure out what makes professional writing what it is, or what we want it to be, or what other people might want it to be. discussions about these disciplinary definitions always seem to go around in circles, but somehow I don't hate them for that. it's kind of awesome that we have the power to define and redefine what we do, who we are, and what it means, isn't it?

English 624 Issues In Composition Studies: Modern Period with Dr. Patricia A. Sullivan
once upon a time I had a semester of Modern Rhetorical Theory, but I am not very sure that it was in any way the same thing. maybe it was. if so, it was at a less-intense undergraduate level anyway, less flooded with primary texts from Ramus and Whately and other such folks. that was a long time ago. I blogged a few times about that class. it was my first introduction to rhetoric. and I wrote an essay about the Bible. crazy. I'll try and pay more attention this time around, in any case. I'll try not to blog too much or too boringly about Ramus and Whately and other such folks while I'm at it.

English 681 the Hutton Lectures In Rhetoric And Composition
there are all kinds of rumors about who will be the invited speakers for this lecture series. Dr. Blackmon is keeping us in some suspense about the schedule, so I don't have much to say here yet.

English 502 Writing Lab Practicum with Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan 
did I mention I've been hired at the writing lab for this year? I have dreamed of this day, and the silver platter of fate (upon which have been delivered most of the other great things I've been lucky enough to participate in) has finally obliged to hand me a job as a tutor. my first week has been pretty fun, and this class will make sure I keep enough professionalism and strategy mixed in, as well. writing lab work will probably contribute to 59% of all my rushing around this fall, but I am pretty sure it will be worth the craziness.

and now, I think I'll go sit on my back porch and continue with all the reading...

answerless

puzzles make very neat metaphors. much like black boxes, the concept could be hiding almost anywhere. and like so, so many other words (wave, pencil, etc.) it is both a noun and a verb.

you don't exactly puzzle a puzzle though. you solve it, if you can.

most of the time we puzzle over other stuff: puzzling, bewildering things that may or not literally be puzzles.

this week I am puzzling over the syllabus I'm supposed to be polishing up and the worthiness of owning this or that sort of gas-powered vehicle.

literal puzzles are more fun. they have such low stakes and predetermined answers. the crossword kind might be my favourite. mm.

{ photo via this kind soul on flickr. }

I think words are more interesting than paintings... but jigsaws can be just the thing if you've got the space and a few uninterrupted weekends with family.

so many kinds of puzzles, there are. once upon a time ten years ago friend Wilson introduced me to this infamously most difficult of all internet riddles. I didn't finish it.

a few days ago I ran across this maddening puzzle via twitter. I spent a few stop-and-go days getting up to level 31. I have been there for ages now. please, if anyone gets past this one... tell me the secret.

it must be solvable. I just can't figure it out yet.

regular life is not a jigsaw or a game, I don't think. definitely not one with neat, pre-cut, smooth-edged pieces. no... life is more like this image from a poem I read recently:

When the wind comes, and the snow repeats us,
 / how like our warped lives it is,
Melting objects, disappearing sounds,
Like lichen on gnarled rocks.
For we have lived in the wind, and loosened ourselves like ice
 / melt.
Nothing can hold us, I've come to know. 

it's from "My Old Clinch Mountain Home" by Charles Wright. his book Caribou was on the new books shelf (how I love new books shelves) at the library and I brought it home, not expecting much. I like it though. I didn't get the line spacing quite right in my excerpt, but hopefully the language conjures something poignant for you anyway. as I was thinking about puzzles and their solutions, this poem countered with its un-polished un-clear scenery. wind and water melting and eating away at everything, transforming and being transformed. all of that seems very, very beyond a puzzle.

we like puzzles so much because they have answers and we can hold those answers in our heads and hands and figure them out. this Vsauce video on games gets at this idea, comparing/contrasting life and play. we can win at Poker or Chess or Tennis... but how can we tell if anyone ever wins at Justice or Teenagerhood or Making A Difference? games and life don't work the same. unless they do...

unless it's only that nobody's figured out exactly how yet.

to sing, to say, to do, to seem

so I dug up the full text of this lovely poem by E. E. Cummings, for May day. I did this during a longer-than-it-should've-been distraction/break from my visual rhetoric research paper. you might remember me having mentioned this poem last semester. who knows why I have become so fond of this poet and his quirky poetry. but this one especially seems so fitting (or at least I think so), and so fun. here, in case you like it enough to want any more, is the digitized text I borrowed it from. maybe these five little stanzas will be my summer poetry-memorization project. (wish me luck with that.)

SONG

but we've the may
(for you are in love
and i am) to sing,
my darling:while
old worlds and young
(big little and all
worlds)merely have
the must to say

and the when to do
is exactly theirs
(dull worlds or keen;
big little and all)
but lose or win
(come heaven,come hell)
precisely ours
is the now to grow

it's love by whom
(my beautiful friend)
the gift to live
is without until:
but pitiful they've
(big little and all)
no power beyond
the trick to seem

their joys turn woes
and right goes wrong,
(dim worlds or bright;
big little and all)
whereas (my sweet)
our summer in fall
and in winter our spring
is the yes of yes

love was and shall
be this only truth
(a dream of a deed,
born not to die)
but worlds are made of hello and goodbye:
glad sorry or both
(big little and all)

notice

they tore out a little patch of grass near the dorms and replaced it with a parking lot.

I was very sad about this, and I will miss those trees. (please, please resist the urge to start quoting that insufferable Counting Crows song. please. goodness, I'm sorry I even brought it up.)

along with the new parking lot there are new curbs and new walkways, and upon all these newly poured stretches of concrete, across which I walk on the days I have class, I noticed a few lovely indentations.

the texture in these photographs is really cool, I think.

all that flat, grainy cement interrupted by the fossil of a leaf...

I remember being so struck by these organic shapes lying so neatly in this man-made surface--as if it were some gloriously surprising and unique occurrence that a leaf would actually get just stuck enough to make a pattern in the sidewalk. but now I've started to see these little fossils all over the place. scattered showers of leaves, impressed at random in what once was wet cement. they're everywhere.

why didn't I ever notice them before?

how to make a crown of leaves

it's July. there are long, empty summer days to fill. spending them as much outside as possible is crucial. spending them outside plucking leaves from bushes so you can make a lovely garland for your head is optional, but just in case you ever feel like doing just that, here is a little tutorial.
I learned how to make leaf crowns from an old, red, hardcover book we used to have. it was full of enlightening activities for young people, and it had a section on photography, a section on sewing, and a few sections on outdoor crafts like this. crowns made of leaves. I know you're itching to make one, right? at the very least, you must be itching to teach your daughter or your niece or your kid sister how to make one. they're fun, I promise.

to begin, gather a bunch of beautiful green leaves (actually, they needn't be green. just alive enough to be flexible. dried out leaves will probably crack, break, and/or fall apart).

lilac leaves are some of my favourite to use, and that's what you see in my photographs, but any leaf with a decently long stem will work. how many leaves you need depends on the size of your head and the size of the leaves. you can always pick more if you need.

start with two.

gently pull off the stems of each leaf and be careful not to tear the main part of the leaf. you could use scissors here for a perfectly clean cut... but a sharp fingernail works well enough. keep the stems handy--we are going to use them in a moment.

as you go, you'll layer each pair of leaves like this, so the tip of one leaf covers the base of the next. note that this is a view of the underside, so it looks the wrong way around. I find it easier to work from the back. you of course can do things however you want, once you've got the concept down.

holding both leaves together, make two small slits with your fingernail (unless you really feel like breaking out a craft knife or something like that). be sure to cut all the way through both leaves where they overlap.

here's where you'll need the stems we removed from each leaf. use each little stem as a pin to sew the leaves together. go in from the back so the ends of each stem don't stick out on the front.

keep adding more leaves, using the very same process.

here's how it'll look from the front. I have heard of people hooking little flowers in where the leaves are joined, but I haven't tried that myself. someday I might get to that level. I'll let you know.

when your chain of leaves gets long enough, do a few fittings to test how it will look on your head. once you're pretty sure it'll fit, join the tip of the last leaf over the top of the base of the first leaf. connect it with the last little stem, and there you have a lovely little crown.

this one turned out a little bit large for me, but it stayed on for the most part. if yours is too big, there is always the option of taking out a leaf. or finding someone with a bigger head. or starting over. I suppose, to avoid such mishaps, you could always measure your head beforehand and approach this little outdoor craft with some kind of scientific precision, if that's your thing. I'll leave that up to you.

don't laugh at my slightly goofy grin here. instead, notice the lovely lilac bush in the background. thanks to it for a few handfuls of leaves, and extra thanks to friend Shara for playing photography assistant. somewhere in a box, I think, I have a picture of the two of us wearing leaf crowns we made way back during my first year of college. those were the good old days, eh?

suddenness

last week I threw all my possessions into boxes and moved precisely 4.2 miles around the corner. my zip code changed by one measly number.

I'm 3.2 miles closer to work now. there is a garage and a basketball hoop and a tree full of wind chimes. and we have a sunroom. but I'm going to convince everyone to call it the conservatory. is that okay? who doesn't want a house with a conservatory in it? we could stage our own live-action version of Clue now, couldn't we? dear littlest brother: let's.

a picture of our conservatory. there are my little jade plants again. just behind them is a pot of houseleeks. I hope I don't kill them. maybe I should replant them outside somewhere. maybe they don't deserve to be trapped in a terracotta pot.

I wouldn't call this new house just another terracotta pot for my life... but some people might. I've been replanted so many times now, it hardly matters anyway.

my zip code has changed by one measly number, right at the end. will that be good enough? will this slight rearrangement suffice to soothe my restlessness? or will I remain beset by rather crazy urges to run away to Baltimore? or England or China or Idaho or Canada or New York or wherever?

better questions might in fact be: will I still, despite this perfect opportunity to start over and redraw the map I'm supposedly following, be afraid to do all the things I really want to do? will there still, despite this chance to re-evaluate and resolve, be a million what ifs doing their best to hold me back?

4.2 miles is not very far. I don't think it's far enough to kill the what ifs.

a medley of past junes

you may have noticed an absence of writing here lately.

I am busy.

and for the nearly entire month of June, I will be hopelessly, gloriously busy working as a counselor to dozens of teenaged girls.

so if you are by chance craving the tangled tang of my strung-together prose, you are welcome to consult the following short list of old blogposts. all of them were originally published in June... just not this June of 2011.

seven stories is just right, an ode to southern california
story ammunition, all about magazines
observations on..., from that day I spent at the airport
the world is quiet here, for the love of reading aloud
hinted at, even though back then I hardly knew anything
waterslides and spoons, or alternatively, ease and beauty
absolute/absolvent, on the nature of truth, words, and me
traffic, which includes a few weird band names
philosophical grammaticality, a sort-of-review
guide and stay, about people, places, things, and change.

that should tide you over, eh?

painstaking needlework and such

none of the following were on my list of things-to-blog-about last week.

does that matter?

the list is pretty amorphous, and to it I have recently added some random works-in-progress, which probably don't deserve all this attention quite yet.

this embroidery/hand-sewing project has been and will be unfinished for a while. I've been working on it intermittently for months and months. but I'll let you know if it ever gets done.

and here is a hint at a project I haven't even started working on properly. but I'll write more about it... sometime. in the meantime, be curious.

this one, a very fuzzy and wonderful scarf (yeah, I know it's summer. so what?), I am right in the middle of. I began the thing with borrowed crochet hook, and I have yet to locate my own hook with which to continue. isn't that beautiful yarn? thank you, littlest sister, for not wanting it, so I could have it.

I haven't told you all about this, have I? it's... I don't even know yet. it doesn't count as literal needlework, but it is definitely painstaking. I've been revising The Plaid Identity for writing group lately. for some reason. it's a fun story, but it needs so, so much attention. the blogs I keep setting up for the monstrous thing haven't really helped motivate me to work on it much... but for now, there is the beginning of yet another spin-off (remember this little pirate one?). maybe it will amuse someone while I work on all my random unfinished projects.

PS: happy first of June.

be my polaris

I was telling friend Chris the other day just how strange things feel when new people make themselves important to you in unexpected ways. 'it's confusing, almost,' I said. 'disorienting. like the ground has turned into a quilt of waffles. yes, that is what it's like. sort of crispy waffles, but not all that adequately stitched together...'

and I have been walking around on this inadequately stitched quilt of waffles for a few weeks now, re-learning who I am and where it is I'm trying to go. this isn't easy, but it is exciting. everything has started to look different. all my reference points have shifted.

okay... not all of them. there are a few that never move and never will. and then there's me.

or is it just a me-shaped hole in the universe?

muffled shouts

there's a hymn. it talks about unseen wounds, and how to heal them.

wound.

unless you're talking about clocks or stress or something, the word means an injury or a casualty. some bodily harm or figurative inner pain. to hurt. to bruise. all its synonyms feel so sharp in your mouth--incision, laceration, abrasion...

how could a person be wounded and not know it? pain is one of those really hard-to-ignore sensations. it's meant to be noticed and demands to be fixed. but I suppose the hymn is talking about spiritual wounds. the kind that aren't so hard to ignore, perhaps.

but even physically, there are a billion things inside our bodies that we can hardly imagine. the inner workings of cells and blood vessels. neurons and segments of DNA. there may be wounds on such levels that are impossible to notice.

I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake a few weeks ago. it was a very easily devoured slice of literature, but it had a weirdness to it. I'll let you go read about the weirdness for yourself, if you want, while I sit here and tell you nothing much more than you could read on the back cover about the story. it's about a girl who can taste the emotions (or lack thereof) of the people (or factories) who produced the food she eats. and it's usually the emotions people aren't completely aware of. the depression or guilt they've buried far, far beneath their normal lives. or the anger or love or neediness that's screaming silently, deep in their souls.

why do we hide things from ourselves like that? is it out of self-preservation, or something? denial, or self-delusion? do we imagine that the things we refuse to acknowledge really don't exist? or at least that they won't effect us if we can manage to ignore them?

or is it so willful at all? what if we honestly don't notice these wounds we carry? what if these missing pieces in our hearts really are impossible to detect? what if it is not my fault?

lucky

this is a blurry photograph of my fortune cookies. yes, I made fortune cookies last week--and this time they turned out a million times better than the first time I tried making fortune cookies, way back when I was 12 or so, using a recipe I found in a Mulan coloring book.

the recipe I used this time came from this website, in case you want to try it someday. I compiled a page of little fortunes from a variety of sources to stick in the middle of the cookies. one of them said 'Never buy anything electrical from a flea market.' a lot of them were quotations, like this one from Frank Chimero: 'Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling.' and this one from Christopher Morley: "Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do."

I didn't use up all the little fortunes I printed, so perhaps I will have to make more cookies, someday. they tasted quite lovely, even without any almond extract.

made

blog-friend Gina does a bunch of hand stitching. it's quite impressive.

me, I've never hand-stitched anything aside from little nylon christmas stars. and bits of embroidery, if you can count those. I've almost always been lucky enough to have access to a sewing machine, and that makes sewing projects much quicker. if I don't have a sewing machine, I generally don't really sew anything.

except, this last month I had the brilliant idea to make a bag as a gift for friend Shara. I measured a bit and cut the pieces (from old khakis--the same ones I used here, actually--and also a cute pillowcase. my clever sister would be so proud), and pinned things together. and then I debated with myself. should I start calling in favors from people I know who have sewing machines? if I asked Shara's parents would I still be able to keep this project a secret? hmm.

making phone calls seemed almost like more effort than sewing by hand... so I set to work. very secretively, squirreling away all my scissors and fabric and thread every time my roommate came home, I stitched this thing together: first the pillowcase lining, then the khaki outside, then the handles. I chose a lovely blanket stitch for all the edges, not trusting myself to sew a decently straight length of top-stitching by hand. maybe if I had years of practice or were a pioneer housewife... but I don't and I'm not.

anyway--pictures:

see? it turned out very nicely. I had it done in plenty of time for Christmas, and I did not have to beg anyone for use of a sewing machine (thought I almost did, and Bekah's sister was very willing to help me out there. thanks anyways.) I didn't get to see my roommate open it, but she called the other day and said she loved it, which makes me happy. I just hope it doesn't fall apart or anything.

cottonwood faeries

once upon a time there was a very tall cottonwood tree, and once upon a time somebody (I imagine a wizened, white-haired sage, with a long, thick cloak) nailed a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth into its trunk. since then, the mouth and one eye have fallen off. maybe that's why one of its bottom branches on the north side is looking a little bit dead. maybe the cottonwood is losing its magic.

this cottonwood tree, like every cottonwood tree, produces cottonwood seeds, which as everyone knows sprout fuzzy little wings and turn into cottonwood faeries. this summer, our entire neighborhood was caught in the throes of their chaotic dancing. they love windy days. I wish I had pictures of them then. if any little balls of cotton could be described as fierce, these could.

but when the wind stops, the faeries get lazy. they congregate in the bushes and the grass and the gutters and the windowsills, and they do their best to impersonate spiderwebs. of course, we all know better. we know that they are in fact sleepy, sluggish faeries who ought to be flying far, far away to plant new cottonwood trees out in the great wild world. though I suppose after all that revelry anyone would need a bit of a rest.

those summer cottonwood faeries have been gone for months now, but a few weeks ago their cousins showed up. it was, as usual, on a very windy day. they climbed stealthily up into the branches of our very tall cottonwood tree and tore off its golden leaves one at a time. then they flew them all over the yard like magic carpets, swirling and rushing and looping and diving like mad.

and now, even those faeries have gone to sleep underneath the increasingly bare branches of the very tall cottonwood, curled up invisibly among the broken twigs and dampened grass of late, late autumn.

last weekend, snow started falling. all of the summer faeries and almost all of the autumn faeries have been buried in white, become frozen and dormant. only the ice faeries are brave enough to visit the old one-eyed tree now. it will be many months before the dancing seed-faeries make a reappearance. with any luck I'll have my camera ready when they do.

things I am too busy to blog about

it's thursday already, and my weekend is going to be spent traveling, visiting, and playing dress-up. but I can't just let the end of october go by without composing something, no matter how little thought-out.

so here is a list, culled from the unfinished drafts sitting around behind the scenes of this little blog:

- ideas that I may never stop arguing about (in my head or otherwise) with people

- some thoughts William Gibson had concerning writing and the internet

- this guy and his adventures with ink and paper

- my opinion of Kevin Guilfoile, whoever he is

- the reasons for having family reunions

- how sad I am about this, even though it happened a good eight months ago

- several gushy Sherlock Holmesian bits, with a small dash of Dracula on top

and I'm promising I will get to most of those. the Sherlock and the Gibson and the family reunion stuff definitely. and I also have a few backlogged thoughts about things unseen, things unsaid, postage stamps, and what Oscar Wilde wrote about color speaking to the soul ...

if november comes along with a little bit less craziness, I expect I shall be blogging more than I did this month. unless, I'm too busy sketching christmas cards(shall I have another contest this year?), designing a new day-planner(to replace this one), formatting that digital cookbook(for some reason), or studying for the GRE(like I was doing last year before I had a job). we can only hope, right?